Episode 174: How to talk with sales about ABM with Andrei & Vladimir

This is the Full Funnel B t B Marketing podcast, brought to you by full Funnel Doto. Let's start. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of Full Funnel Live. We're waiting for Andrey to restart his router and we just want to kick things off as he is coming on.

Let us know, as always we are joining him from Spain. I'm calling in from Valencia. Andrew will be joining some from Villa Real. Let us know where you're joining him from.

And meanwhile, I'll just give a quick intro and we can get things started. Today. We want to talk about a topic that we very frequently see in the practice, which is all about how to talk to sales about ABM. What we want to explain is how to how to prepare the conversation with sales team about ABM, how to find the best candidate within the sales team to run the pilot program together and try IBM and show that it works.

But also, very importantly, if we do get that buy in, how do we ensure that they're actually prioritizing the pilot and not their own KPIs and doing maybe their outreach or let's say more kind of lead generation approach with that said, will get it started. But I wanted to welcome Andrey. Hopefully the uter is working and you have a good Internet connection. Hi, Era one.

I'm got to see in a new season awful funal life. A lot already shared the intro. I just want to add my two cents. So for this new season, we have invited lots of great guests.

Every week will be hosting people who are going to speak also at our annual Full Final Summit, so stay tunes. That would be lots of great episodes. And today, indeed, we want to dive deeper. We want to kick it off together and we want to dive deeper into a topic that kind of constantly appeared through the conversation, basically when we had conversations with B two, b cmos ABM a stranger.

Everyone wants to start it, but the biggest problem is how to actually talk with cells about it. So as always, guys, yeah, very welcome to share your questions in the chat. Will cover all of them. And with that being said, let's start with how conversations were sells about usually happened?

Right? I used here a couple of maps from my favorite movies. Probably all of you can recognize this scene from the Godfather movie, right, And this of reminds me about conversations between marketing and sales about ABM. Marketing cons and says a we want to start ABM.

We want to help you guys to generate pipeline or close the existing pipeline, or help with the expansion. And then you know how it's usually interpreted by sales. They say, okay, marketing wants to work with us, They want to do ABM with us, but it means that they are going to support our motions. And if sales are not operating in account based sales motion, right, if it's just the sales let organization with the traditional setup right where there are hunters and closers right where once yeah, they have territory plan and picking up big accounts.

What happens next is basically sales shares list of their dream accounts right from different territories and ask market and go and chase them. Right, pretty similar scenario. So in nutshell, there is no real ABM happening. All is what we call now ABM is that now marketing is going to support let's say traditional outbound was maybe air cover some ads across multiple channels and that's it, right.

There is no real collaboration, there is no real change management, and there is no real buy in. So what we want to do next is basically shared two parts. Right, One is how to prepare for conversation with sales leadership about ABM. What are you going to?

What do you need to prepare to get there? Buy in? Right? So what arguments?

And then what we would love to share next is how to ensure that the sales ad or the sales team that is going to engage with you, that has going to execute ABM programs, you want to prioritize it, right, the most important thing. So will that being said, maybe let's go one by one blood and start with how to prepare for a conversation the sales leadership about ABM. All right, So I love the way that Ken Roden, who's the customer at a company that we work with for about a year launching the ABM pilot, how he thinks about change, how he thinks about these conversations, and the way that he described it.

He said, you know what, actually the best way to think about it is an internal journey, internal buyer journey. At the end, what you're trying to do is you're trying to influence the people, change their mind, change the status quo, exactly what we as marketers are good at doing. So if you start thinking about it, the first thing you want to do is you want identify who are the buyers or the buying committee inside and specifically when we talk about sales or the people that you need to influence them.

And so when you talk to leadership, if you want to understand, what we always say is marketers, interview your customers. Right, interview your buyers, understand what their challenges are, and that will help you create the right marketing message. Right understanding your buyers. And it's a little bit like that when we want to drive this internal change and influence is we need to understand what their challenges are and we need to understand it for two reasons.

As I said, it's very difficult to get somebody's buying if you're not actually offering a solution to a problem that they experience. Right, so your proposal to run ABM should be positioned as a solution to a challenge that they experience. And the second soul, the second reason why I want to do this interviews is also to really understand where the biggest challenges are in the process so that in your ABM pilot you can address those challenges. And that is exactly what the purpose of this interview is.

You will see on the screen for those who are following us live and or on video. We have questions like, Okay, what frustrates you the most within the sales process? Where do you see the biggest drop off? Where do you are you having difficulties getting a response, booking meetings, moving deal forward after the discovery and what are the biggest challenges in our go to market that you face?

Right, So basically we want to understand this, as I said, for their own frustration, so that we can later position our ABM proposal or a program as a solution, but also to understand what are the real challenges. Is it like for example, here, often you know it's very difficult for me to get a response because there is lack of awareness. Well, if that's the challenge, that means that in our ABN program we need to work on awareness. If it is you know what, we have engaged accounts.

Actually we are receiving engaged accounts from marketing. But these accounts are you know, maybe they're engaged in marketing, but it's still difficult for us to get those responses. Well, maybe we need something more in the middle of the funnel, et cetera. So that is the step number one.

Step number two is all about understanding the actual sales process and maybe Andre you want to present this one. Yeah. Absolutely. Also one quick not is that I would love to share, is that the screenshots that you see here, the screenshots that we made from some of our consult and projects, the inter you in sales leaders right.

Why I'm showing this because it's really essential. When you guys will have these interviews, you need to make some notes, right. Obviously you are not going to make an extended version of this. Ideally you need to transcribe it and then create, let's say, pick up the quotes from these conversations.

I prefer to start with country to notes, capture and the core insights and then compliment them. Why because then when you'll see later when we are going to prepare a business case and the presentation of the program to sales leadership, we want to use sales language right, very similar to COT right and best practices because they are our internal buyers. Right, We need to sell them the idea. So what is really essential and why we want to dig deeper into prospecting and sales processes because it's not enough just ask about the go to market challenges.

I guess that in most cases the answers are always similar. Lack of print awareness, it's hard to book meetings, et cetera. Right in many organizations. More or less, these patterns are repetitive.

Now, what is really important is to understand where the gaps and the sales process in the prospective process. Right, this is where you can find tons of areas for improvement and outline your ABM program as a solution right to these challenges. Quite often you might see that there is no real account prioritization, right, so all accounts are treated the same way. There is no relationship building, there is no constant engagement.

It's all about sending. You know, hey, let's can I pick your brain for fifteen minutes? Or we sell job prole like yours these problems? Would you like to have a discovery call?

The typical outreach? Right, this is our opportunity to identify the gaps and then come up with the practical areas for improvement. Also, what is really important here is asking about what they feel, I mean, your sales colleagues. What do they feel is not working well?

Or where are the gaps? What could be done better? Right? Because then you can use it again as a proof for your ABM program and when you'll do these interviews.

What is really important is listening and paying attention to three important points that will help you to identify potential champions, right, the best, let's say, the best candidates for your ABM program. These are not necessary necessarily your top performers, because I mean, if they are performing well, probably they won't be engaging a lot with you. And it shouldn't be your senior sales reps. Right, don't try to engage them.

Instead, talk to SDRs or business development managers or account executives. And then listen to who is who's providing you a detailed answer. Who is openly challenging the existent playbooks, the existing processes right or talks with frustration. Who is not accepting the start of score right?

Who is also open to you approach as somebody who might mention I have heard about I don't know, I'm thinking out loud. I have heard about social sealing. I have seen some sales reps are post and content and linked in, and it seems it's a good idea to kind of warm up and nurch our target buyers right something that is out of the typical sales processes box. These are these three let's say, points that we personally pay attention to when selecting the best candidate.

When you finish this interviews, the next step is preparing this detailed analysis. So feel free or pick it up lot. Yeah, I think this is basically Remember when I work with a client and we were preparing a case, they actually asked me to have a look at what they're doing right now and show how are we going to do better? So, I mean it's a very logical question that you might get from your sales leadership to understand, Okay, what are you actually going to improve?

What are the tangible improvements that you can make? And for sales, what that means is that you're able to engage more accounts, better accounts. Maybe not in terms of the volume. Let's say that the idea what I hear very often from sales is that they're not necessarily looking to, you know, from marketing to get you know, hundreds of opportunity is with smaller companies or lower mid sized market.

They are usually looking to get better opportunities with larger accounts. Those I remember, like one of the sales directors, the way that she described it, we need to be less opportunistic in terms of, you know, let's just get any meeting that we can get. But let's also she says, if we focus on our sweet spot, she called it sweet spot, we can get accounts, bigger accounts, we can close them better, we can close more of them. They are going to stay longer, we are going to be able to expand them better, et cetera, et cetera.

So when you're looking at these numbers, it's good as you see for those who are watching here, comparing the different motions, the different ways to generate sales, qualified opportunities and revenue, and understanding the current let's say, benchmarks to understand what's working, what's not working, and so you can define the improvements. But also I would advise, like what you see, for example, here you have the average contract value as one of the metrics that you're looking at.

You're also looking at the sales cycle length. You're in other words, looking at sales velocity metrics that tell you how effective you're in this. We are here comparing three different motions for example, m QL's G two, intent signals and sales outbound for those who can't see this, and we are seeing different metrics. So you're not only looking at the total volume, but you're also looking at quality as I indicated.

So once you understand that, you will be able to identify where the bottlenecks are in this process where you should actually improve. So communicate. Okay, if we do this in a different way, If we do ABM, we are going to focus on smaller number of accounts. We are going to focus on higher value deals.

We are going to focus on increasing the conversion rate so that you can actually present your program as a very tangible improvement to the current programs what I was asked by that sales director to do. So once you have done this analysis, which is basically understanding the numbers, what's really important is that you're defining the program. I already mentioned this as a solution to actual challenges, and we have a very specific approach to doing that. So maybe Andrew, you can explain how we do the requirements.

Correct we have at this stage right. We have done the interviews, so we know what does the status quot what should be improved where sales feel and frustration? Right, And we have done the analysis of performance of the existing playbooks, so we back our arguments with the data. Right.

So it's not like, okay, I feel our treach is not working or our GTM is broken. Right now, you show the real data and you show the sneapets and quotes from the interview. The next step, obviously is moving away from again non tangible decisions like okay, let's improve called out reach, so let's improve our prospect And it means nothing, right, It can mean a lot of it can mean a lot of different things. What is really important is making it tangible and granular.

Okay, if well, now these gaps and our processes, what can we do better for example? Right? And obviously it requires a joint conversation between marketing and sales. Right.

So it's not that marketing only makes this decision or sales just gives you the input. Together while looking at the numbers and the analysis or basically the summary of this interrow, so you define specific processes that you believe is important to improve. For example, we need to improve account prioritization, to define which accounts deserve full personalization one on one sales attention. Right, So we'll run the through account based marketing.

Or for example, we know that we use clay. We do like we send personalized emails, but it doesn't move the needle because it's not the real personalization. It's just summarizing. AI summarizes all publicly available data.

Right, But the truth is that everybody has access to the same insights. It's not the real personalization. It's just summarization of the publicly available data. Right.

So we define those processes together. Next we put the reason why do we need to improve them? Because is what you're going to present to the leadership as well. And then we recommend to do two things.

First, evaluate the current let's say the current performance of a specific process. We prefer to use a simple score and from zero to five. Zero is like okay, we'll do it. Three really bad.

Five we're doing this exceptionally well. For example, if you prefer other score and feel free to do it in any way that is convenient to you. So why we want to do this because after launching the pilot program, we want to have another session and evaluation. Did we actually improve these processes?

So now right, obviously it's subjective, but what is also important to make it objective. Define the measurements, define the tangible createria to see the improvements, because how do we know if we improved personalization aside from the god feeling decisions? Right, So this is the way you Obviously there are no let's say, there is no rule of somehow to define it. We always like to say that the only right definition is the definition that you make as a team, right, the metric that you select, the measurement criteria that you select, this is the only right criteria.

For example, it could be for account prioritization, you create a spreadsheet or document with clear prioritization criteria for like, for example, what behavior or what criteria an account should match so it deserves full personalization right and one to one playbooks or improving personalization. Right. It could be a number of discovery calls booked with the strategic accounts that you have selected together for your ABM program. Again, these are just examples for you, but this has three important because when you don't have this, quite often companies look at the numbers and they I think I will just very quickly come back to the previous slide.

What happens next is when the wrong decisions are made. Companies, look, let's say at the pilot ABM program that you have executed for three months for one quarter, right, and in ideal scenario, if you have long sale cycles, maybe you end up with the discovery calls. In ideal scenario, maybe you'll create a few sales opportunities, but it's not likely that you'll immediately see the revenue coming in. And where the things can go wrong if you just try to compare the new motion, the new pilot program that you just executed for three months with the programs with the playbooks that you were running for years, right, Obviously this comparison is absolutely incorrect.

So just to avoid this, what is important is making sure that you define the success criteria for this pilot, right, that would be important, And then you look at this measurement criteria, did we achieve this? Did we improve the processes that we have defined? Because what happens when you improve on this processes you just created a new robust, fundamental foundation for your scale and for sustainable cross And when you finish this, the next part is co create a small scope pilot program.

We have covered at multiple times. I will share a link in the chat, but what you may be quickly just summarize the key principles of the small scolle program. Absolutely, there's so much to be said about planning the program, so Andre will share the information about what goes in the program, how to plan it, et cetera. I think the main point here is about the scope.

You want to scope this down to single mark, a single target segment. We like to segment our market by the target use case, create a so called cluster of accounts that share specific challenges or use cases the reasons why they buy our product. We like to keep the number of accounts small. I mentioned previously, it's all about showing that you can do.

You can basically have better conversions, that you can turn more target accounts into qualified sales opportunities than with the more volume based place. So this is going to be a kind of quality over volume, and therefore you don't need big numbers. Also very important, it's just like a practical thing. Look like the salespeople who are going to work with you, if you you know, working let's say with one person, that's the best idea.

That's the idea that we always like try to implement it like that with one kind of sales champion. You don't this person is not going to stop whatever they're working and just dedicate their whole time for this pilot. That's why we also want to keep the pilot very scope downe And then very important as well is that we are not looking at this pilot only as let's say, we're just going to run some air cover from marketing and you're going to then reach out to those accounts that achieve a certain engagement threshold.

As I said under sharing more information about how to actually put this together, but we want to do proper awareness creation, then identifying accounts that are engaged, then gaining the insights into those accounts, doing the proper account research and you know, including basically the different activities that you need to have in the account. And also very important is other than the salesperson, also staffing that minimal team that you have for this pilot with very important subject matter expert that will provide you insights about this target use case and challenges, and somebody from the content team, somebody who can help you create content.

And also somebody from marketing, who's actually going to own this program, who's actually going to drive this who's going to implement it? Make sure that's actually a process that's being run. So that's very few words about how to create a pilot program, and very important for this is, Okay, what's inside of that program? How do we actually create the playbook as we call it to engage those starget accounts and create opportunities, which is the next part.

Just a quick note, I dropped the links to editailed breakdown of how to plan the pilot program and how to orchestrate ABM playbooks for the long sale cycles and the chat so you can read more about these two parts of planning ABM programs after our episode. When you finish the program orchestration. What that is really essential to create the tailed playbooks because we often use let's say common definitions as warming up target accounts, nurture and target accounts, building relationship with target accounts, creat an awareness, right, But honestly, if we now speak to ten different sales reps, everybody would understand it differently, right, everybody has all definition of what awareness means, what relationship means.

Right, So to avoid any let's say any future problems with execution. You need to co create these playbooks together and make them in written format. Why because later, if this playbook will perform well, you'll have a fundamental documentation that you can share with other teams, with other sales reps, so they could replicate the proven processes. Right.

Make sure that first of all you define the time commitment right, how much sales can work. Then nail down exactly when we say that we want to engage the buy and committee, what do exactly we mean and what are we going to execute? Right? Because as I'm saying, everybody could understand it completely differently and turn it into weekly and daily actions.

So for example, that could be something they like. You can see this as a part of our sales engagement playbook, the daily engagement. Right. So what we're going to do.

We want to see who posted what on for example, on linked and from our strategic accounts. Leave meanionful commands use it as an opportunity to start conversations. Want to enable our sales reps with good account based content that they can publish. So then they create the first party signals.

They create engagement from their target bars, which they can use to reach out right. I want to see who visited our profile, who published what on the company's pages, and is it relevant to our product or is it relevant to our solution? And we can use it to reach out to right where there any signals our buyers or demonstrated on the contact level or on the account level, and can we use it for the outreach? Right?

Make a detailed breakdown because nysan else kills ABM programs where you have the initial alignment, then lack of detailed playbooks. Why because everybody understands differently, what do we mean by creating awareness, building relationship, engaging, nurture and et cent. When you finish this, the next part is defining core KPIs and pre are on a program that's board. This is very important because this is where you said the expectation On the one hand, where you said the expectations again, you're doing a pilot for let's say three months, so you can and if your sales cycles are along, you can't expect to generate revenue with for example, that new accounts.

Right, So what are then the metrics that you want to measure? Well, first of all, there's two groups of metrics that relate to what you can control. We like to call them like the account velocity. This is just to say, like, okay, how many accounts are we actually able to get through the full process of our ABM program.

The way that we look at it again, we spoke about it, and I think in the way that Andrew share some of these links. We break down accounts into three groups. Custerizedt accounts that are not aware of us for future pipeline, engaged accounts that we want to know us but we don't know them yet and we want to figure out what are the actual challenges and problems, and active focus. This is the smallest list where we are actively We know that they have a need, they are aware of us, there's some initial relationship, and we're actively trying to generate an opportunity.

So these are the lists that we start with. Usually more accounts in the awareness stage we need to select, qualify, research those accounts. We need to understand the signal, we need to then create awareness, et cetera. So we're doing a number of activities, and the account velocity here just means, okay, how many of these accounts were we able to source within our program?

How many of them were we able to get through the steps that we plan to get how many actually moved or how many were engaged, how many of those engaged ended up being in the active focus, et cetera, et cetera. So this is what we mean by account of velocity. How many, how quickly we are able actually to move those accounts through our program. And it's usually something that we can control because it is directly related to the capacity that we can put into the activities of sourcing and researching those accounts.

Other leading indicators that are also something that we can control are related to the activities. So how many of these accounts were we able to you know, let's say, if we're using some sort of a social engagement playbook, how many buyers from those accounts were we able to engage with social how many of them where we may be, you know, connected to reach out to connect, how many of them did we invite maybe for content collaboration, whatever other specific playbook that you're using.

And then we have lagging indicators, And here very specifically, what we mean by that is what is the result of those activities. This is part that you can't control, You can influence, but can't control, And this is okay, how many of those accounts actually responded, how many of them provided information to you, how many have engaged, and how many at the end discovery calls were you able to book? And how many sales qualified opportunities. These are of course the KPIs that your sales team cares about the most.

But again, and this is important, just because we are in a process that is limited, we need to also monitor these KPI, these leading indicators. And the second point is very very important, especially for sales if we don't track what's actually being done on those accounts. And so let's say we are week ten in our program and there is little engainagement and then sales person says, you know what, this program is not working. And then you go and ask, okay, but let's just check what is actually being done.

And you see that all they did was upload a list of target accounts and buyers in a standard outreach sequence and they didn't get a response. Well, then you know that not a lot of the activities that you have planned were implemented and there is no surprise that there is no a result. So you want to understand what's being done so that you're evaluating the program based on the actual implement while you ever implemented it or not. But also you want to understand what is our capacity as a team.

Okay, we start you ask the salesperson, okay, how many? Like every week we might ask okay, how many target accounts do you think you can reach out to this week? Or let's say this week we are focusing on inviting a monoabinar. How many, realistically are you able to do this week?

Oh, you know what, I need to go to this event and I have three important client calls, so I will only be able to dedicate you know, Thursday and Friday to this, so I'll be able to do x amount. Well, okay, fair enough, But then let's also track how many of those were done. With these numbers, you will be able to evaluate, you know, what is our actual capacity to engage, what is the effectiveness of these activities? And at the end, these are the numbers that you need to evaluate the program.

Otherwise you're just going to have a very quicken snap judgment from some Oh the program is not working, or sometimes the opposite can be true. When you have some success, the leadership might be just saying, you know what, this webinar worked it worked really well. Let's just double down on webinars. I mean, and I'm talking from experience.

I'm not inventing this, and then then you can come to them and show them, hey, hey, wait a minute, you know this is everything that went into this, these accounts beforehand, these are all the activities. So it's not just about doubling down on webinars, it's about doubling down on everything that happened before that help us get in this notice so that these people actually even looked at the message when we invited them to this webinar, and you know, basically to know that we are actually what are the activities if we need to scale this?

What are the activities that we need to scale? So this is I think we have this. Also the slides, as always, we are going to share them, so if you want to take a snapshot of this dashboard, feel free to do that. And then we come to the last point, which is about preparing a business case to get the buying from the sales leadership.

And I would love to share why it's important to have a business case, not necessarily the deck. Right, Almost all sales teams that operate and long sales cycles know the concept of the business case the user to engage champions. They use it to facilitate the internal sales right among strategic accounts. So the same approach we need to use here.

Right in natural it should be really simple. This business case is all about highlighting hookah created it and then providing the executive summary the key challenges. Right. Then basically your solution in naturall, what we'll have to present here is our current status.

Right. We have the numbers, we have the interview. So this is where we use the language from our sales reps. Make it tangible.

Right, Never say hey, our prospective is not working. It's not how we can get the buy in. Right. Put the numbers from your analysis here, put the sales quotes right.

Next, explain what do you want to do, right, we want to launch this functional program that would be focused on this and that you put the processes. You can also prepare the breakdown of the key challenges. And there isn't how these challenges are impacting your revenue. Right.

So something that we have described in the previous steps. When you build the requirements, you present the success create theory, you present the leading and legging indicators, and you ask for the investment. Right, it could be the budget. It could be usually it's partially, it could be the budget or if you know that getting budget would be hard, which is also fine because sometimes we do countless marketing programs completely without budget.

You just require the time investment right from your sales rep. Because I mean partially, you can ask for twenty forty percent of time of the sales rep, which means for the sales leadership it's an investment. Right. It means that for that percentage of time, sales rep won't be run on the standard sales processes, right, so in that case we need to justify that investment.

This is the last step you prepare the tailed business case. You again do it together with your sales rep because cells know how to do it well. And if you guys would be again interested if all this preparational part something that you'd like to work on or get at the heeled guidance, check out a full funnel academy. We have tons of structured playbooks with the documentation including plan and pilot, ABM orchestration and ABM programs, et cetera.

I drop the link in the chat. So this is something that you can evaluate to dig deeper, uh, to sum it up right, to sum it up the entire process. We'll start with getting the fustration right and uncovering the gaps in the sales processes. And we'll pay attention to who is openly talking about the broken playbox?

Right? Who is openly talking about the gaps in the sales processes? Right? Next we're on the analysis.

We'll bring the data to prove that something should be improved, not just that we think it should be improved, but look at this data. Right. If you basically what you present to your sales leadership is the cost of an action. If I'm not going to change this, were likely to miss our revenue targets by x percent this year.

Next, you prepare the requirements, what specific processes we want to improve, why, and what metrics right will tell us that we actually improved it. You co create the pilot, You prepare the success criteria, leading and leg and indicators, and you packet in this actionable business case. Now, when it's done, the car start right. Let's say you got buy in.

You want to start the program. How to ensure that the sales rep that would be a part of your pilot program? One the priority, I say, be a pilot better to us. It's the most difficult part.

The first step here is that, and I mentioned this already, you want to agree on the realistic time commitment. To be able to do that, you first need to make very explicit what is actually expected from this person, what is actually expected in terms of like what do they need to do? And we like to I think we'll show this, Yeah, we'll show this later. Show these activities mapped to the weeks excuse me, days of the week, sorry, so that they really literally know, you know, what it takes about, you know, day to two, Like we say ten to fifteen hours, which is a probleamately one to two days in total.

Sometimes people are not able to allocate that much time. But at least it should be like this eight to ten hours, which is basically one day, one one and a half hour a day. And we need to list the exact activities. You know, some of these activities they will be able to do in addition or when they're doing their prospecting, so it's kind of going to change their prospecting routine adding a few more activities.

Some of these activities will be new, So make it explicit get the realistic time commitment, and you want to confirm it with both the REP who knows very well what they're able to do, but also to get this explicitly confirmed with leadership. You know what in the next ten weeks, we're going to work with this rep. This is the goal. We have presented this in the business case.

You know, the goal is to show you that we can engage more target accounts and generate more pipeline. But for that we are actually asking these ten to fifteen hours during these ten weeks so that we can actually show that's that's the key step here. But that's not yet enough because they can say they will do, but how they will behave may be different. So let's see what else we need.

What is also important is to protect or just sales reps KPIs right. Like I mentioned, this is the hardest part and this is why we want to get the buy in for the leading and leg and indicators. Because if your sales rep is supposed to work on ABM on an in depth account research right by and committee map and constant multispread and constant engagement and nurturing, but at the same time this sales rep is required to make two hundred called calls every week and the hundreds of linked and messages and e mails.

It means that the sales rep is operated in two contradictory systems, and which one the rep will prioritize the answer subverbs right, the one that is paying the salary, as simple as that. So we have seen this multiple times. So it's coming from our experience. Right.

If I want to ensure that the sales trap wants disengaged soon and when you prioritize the pilot, we need to agree that either the sales reps quota will be adjusted right, basically decreased, or the KPIs would be adjusted right, or that sales rep can skip let's say outbound KPIs and just report on discovery calls booked or pipeline created whatever, right Only when you have this in place, only then you can expect that sales rep wants the prioritize the pilot. And it's honestly, it's extremely important to get a written confirmation from sales leadership something.

When you have just one on one and somebody says, yeah, it's fine, let's see how it works. It won't work. It's just a matter of time. When a sales leader will say, Okay, I don't see any results from this ABM, please start doing what you're supposed to do, right, So make sure there is a written conversation confirmation on the adjusted quota or KPIs and make this non niga shape before starting.

Don't just agree on something. Let's see how it works and then we make a decision because it will fire back really soon. So this is the second essential step. And then when when it comes to execution, the next step is another extremely important point.

So feel free to present this one lot. Absolutely, it's really important not to assume that these reps are going to know exactly what they need to do for I wanted to say for many reps, but I have to be very honest. For all the reps that we have worked with, this was a lot. Some of these and most of these activities were new.

They have never done anything like that before. They haven't or they have done maybe some activities, but never to that full extent. To properly engage, to properly work with marketing, to use content and marketing maybe has created for them or together with them, to kind of patiently build relationships. This is something that is new for a lot of reps, and don't just ask them do you know how to do it and expect that they will tell you.

You know, if they tell you yes, it still doesn't mean So just don't even ask because it's a worthless question because if they say yes, it doesn't mean that they actually know what it entails, and they might just that, you know, what you mean is really just a basic engagement sequence that there have been already running. A lot of them will assume that, right, and people also don't want to feel the better, so they will say yes usually to questions like that. So just organized a training and the best way to do this is to involve somebody who is like has the expertise, you know, like what a senior person who has external expertise, whether that's you know, a trainer or somebody who knows, for example, very good social selling, or somebody who is like the account executive with a lot of experience and the right mindset to help train the rep.

And this is as I said, don't just assume that they know. Very frequently we have been you know, even after doing the training, and then the rep is running for a week or two and then they have some issues and things might not be working or whatever, and it's like you're trying to figure out what's going on here, and you dive deeper and you figure out they didn't understand fully. So don't assume. Even for example, what we see and a lot of marketing teams is that the marketing somebody from marketing might just present a playbook to sales and expect them to just run it.

And when they don't run it, it's like, oh, but sales doesn't want to follow up. Don't expect that, don't assume it. Do it. Take one account together, if you have somebody external who can help you with that, who has experienced or an experienced account executive, and go through the full process together.

The idea is, of course that they do it themselves afterwards. But do this step because very frequently it's just because they don't know exactly what to do, or they maybe assume that they should just you know, do their like let's say standard outreach. When you say you know, these are the steps that need to be done, that it doesn't work out at the end. This is a critical step.

And speaking about execution and actually doing what needs to be done, I think there is another important point coming up about that. I think I will very quickly describe to last points and then we'll move to the community questions, because we have really good questions also from Kerry and from Jeremy, So I would love to spend some time on answering them. Two last important questions, right, which are the logical consequences of everth and that we have presented. First, we need to create a simple report to track our efforts and efficiency.

Again, nothing frustrates more and Nason kills more ABM programs than the answer from a sales rep. Yeah, I'm working on it. Yeah, for sure, I will do it. But what does it mean?

Or did you engage this account? Did you engage the accounts that we have selected last week's Oh, yeah, for sure, I have done everything. What exactly send the one link in and message of one connection, request live in, one comment, send them five emails? What exactly have we done?

Honestly, my probably best answer to this part, and the best argument comes from the most famous quote from Peter Druker. What does not measure it is not existent? Right, So the same is here. If I want to make sure that the execution happens, we need to see what effort will put in and what is an ROI of this report effort?

Sorry, So for this specific reason, when you define the daily playbooks right, daily and weekly playbooks, make sure that you start tracking the numbers because at the end of the pilot, it will provide your answers to two important questions. Did we put enough efford and what could happen if we put more effort into it? Because this is an answer if we created a scalable motion or all right, So this is the first part and the second part it's extremely essential to set up regular weekly review and plan and calls.

Again, if you just work in silace and assume that sumption would happen and you just meet as synchroniously, I guarantee you that your program will fail and will fail fast. What as essential you have the cross functional team, you have market and you have sales, you have product. Every week you define how the success will look like this specific week and what should we execute this week in terms of influence and accounts that I engage in with us, accounts that demonstrate and signals but were not added to our program.

Right, some actions that important to execute to run our playbooks, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Make them, can create make tangible agreements and visible agreements. Not I'm going to research ten accounts this week, but I'm going to research Aple, Microsoft, Oracle, Adobe, et cetera. Right, you find exactly what should happen.

Don't leave any ambiguity to your weekly plan. And because ambiguity kills the ABIM programs. With the five let's say things in place, you can be pretty much sure that your program will work and will work well. Why because every week you can do the trouble shooting.

If you see that TRAPP is not putting enough afford or not executing the backlock of tasks, you can initiate the conversation. Look when you share this program to fix these challenges? Right, this I was success criteria that we define together. If I'm not going to fix it, well, likely to miss outware revenue targets.

How can we mitigate this bottleneckt How can we help you? Do? We need to get an approval from somebody? Right?

Is there anything that is holding us back when you have these conversations. It's not about blaming, but it's just constant improvement. Right, Or if you like the guides and approach right, it's constantly improving and making sure that you're moving forward as a team. It's not easy, for sure, but it's the only way how to create the cross functional motion and making sure your ABM program will work.

And with that being said, we can answer your questions guys, But first of all, let us know how did you like this episode? Was it helpful? Did you learn something? You just share a quick feedback in the chat and let's pick up first of all, questions from Carry and Jammy asked, what if you don't have SDRs on the salespeople with the context they just work on unbound pipeline.

What else's flat? Yeah? I think there are three solutions from practice, just talking from experience. Here you have people who are essentially account executives for killingly inbound a pipeline.

You have one solution which we implemented, was where we actually got a buying going through the process that it described today, we got the buying from for the ABM pilot and then together with sales leadership, we have identified one account executive to be part of the pilot. It was an account executive who kind of matched the champion created. Andre shared that was somebody who wanted to do who was let me put it like this, most engaged was looking to earn new ways of reaching out to target accuntunce who was kind of ambitious, wanted to learn, and we work with them knowing and this was exact experience.

We knew this upfront and this is exactly what happened. The pilot worked quite well considering the amount of time this account executive was able to put in the pilot. I mean, that's just the fact that they will never be able to put as much time in the pilot as asdrs because they will always have like whenever they have an actual client, an actual deal, you know, client meetings on prospect meetings and things like that, they will always prioritize this and they should. I mean, I'm not saying that they shouldn't, but just be aware of that that's one option.

When that's not an option. Another option in another program, we actually had engaged the marketer who was working with us, was doing some of these activities. We actually paired with the subject matter expert, which was a kind of sales engineer or sales architect for their knowledge and we focus on engagement, creating content using that content to engage target accounts. We run an expert a webinar with that subject matter expert, and then the marketer was doing kind of part of the follow up that was supposed to be done by the sales Again, we weren't able to implement all of the activities that you would normally expect a sales rep to do like an SDR, but that was another way to prove to the organization, Hey, if you can do that, that works.

And one other way that I remember from Andrea's experience that you shared with me was you actually hired somebody to work together with on behalf of that account executive and do some of these activities. They simply set aside the budget to hire somebody kind of a sales assistant really to held them out. These are the three from the practice that worked. Ideally, you would engage the salesperson, they will become a part of it.

I would say. Another one quick thing and then I'll finish, is that sometimes you will have account executives who are quote unquote very hungry for pipeline. You will have either their new they're assigned to a new territory, to a new segment, or whatever, and they don't have pipeline, so they're actually also does or I mean their concisions will depend on how much pipeline they can build. That's also another good candidate to involve in this pilot.

We have. Another question from Jamie. We worked on an ICP with Sales. The target addressable marketers around six k accounts.

We segmented them to bring the cl down to three hundred, but we can't seem to get sales to agree on the cl They want to go white and broad. SDRs have a list and they're asking us not to campaign their list. So again, this is the fundamental problem, right. And I remember once we were running the state of all funnel research last year, one of cmos Unfortunately I can't share the full name, but she pretty much nailed it down.

She said that we talk a lot about alignment, but once we have the pressure from the leadership and when it's the targets, everybody is going broad immediately and everybody tends to ignore the ICP. So this is the fundamental problem. And I will tell you the reasons why it doesn't exist. Reason number one, there is no documented and approved by leadership account qualification criteria, and this qualification and b there is no written account prioritization process.

If that wasn't place, you would be never dealing with this issue when it doesn't exist. Everybody has a reason and to share the gut feelings. I know this is a good account or I feel this as a good account, and then you'll always go abroad right because it's much easier to widen the account selection criteria and say that every account is a perfect feed. So these are mostly the reasons, and honestly, my answer is just simple.

You need to a nail down the account qualification and be account prioritization and see qualify and prioritize all the accounts that sales have selected. That would be the first step. The second one looking at your intend data sources, marketing engagement sources, et cetera. And basically bringing some accounts that already well of you demonstrate the engagement and they qualify the fit and your ICP creterial account qualification criteria, but they were not selected by sales.

Better to me, that happens a lot and we're just witnessing this right now. Was one of the teams we are working. Sales are simply not aware of highly engaged accounts that are sitting in the market and let's say systems, so that would be important. I will share we have If you'll miss this link in the chat, feel free to reach out to me on linked and because we have also a video about this and the substract article that I just dropped in the chat.

It's all about how to nail down these two processes and hope this will help. And that being said, there's one more question. I will ask Plot to cover it, but I will need to go. So thank you so much guys for fantastic questions, for fantastic engagement, and stay tuned.

Next week we are going to bring the legendary btle bit market or Matt Hines, so that would be amazing session. Thanks everybody and have a nice day. Cheers. Wow, I actually didn't know that this will happen and so much looking forward to that.

So the other question we got from Sylvan is I can see using ABM for B to B clients and partners, but what about B two C large big targets. So I mean the best way for me to answer this is to share actually quickly here, how was it? How was it? Just give me a second?

Oh yeah, perfect, I got it. We have created this ABM Fit and Readiness checklist, which I think is kind of helpful to answer this question and the way that we think about it. One, is ABM actually a good fit when you have long and complex sales cycles. Typically we are seeing clients have sales cycles between six to up to eighteen months, sometimes longer.

We had a client with more than two year sales cycles. When you have a ACV of at least thirty k, I would say, like fifty k or plus a year. Deal size doesn't have to be all the deals, but let's say the segment that you want to go after in ABM should have that kind of deal size at least to make the ABM pay off to have a good ROI I think whenever you have this doesn't have to be the case, but whenever you have what's called here hybrid sales, which is to say, like you're selling product, but you're also selling some sort of services such as consulting, implementation, training services, things like that, that's a good fit.

When you have multiple buyers and involved, like a lot of us do multiple buyers in the buying committee, in the buying center as there's something called and when you have a small niche a total addressable market like Jamie was sharing. Okay, we segmented down the market down to three hundreds, you know, so we had said here like less than one thousand. These are the cretility that we use. What you see for those who are still watching.

On the right hand side, you also see a readiness checklist. But that's a little bit out of the scope I had. If there's no other question, I still had a question that was shared by the people when they were signing up. So I just want to quickly address this and then we're done.

Anna asked how to set up expectations when product market fit is not there. I think this is a very tricky one. We seen a lot of times that teams try to run ABM before product market fit is Generally, we would never have we would never accept, honestly, like a consulting gig for a pre product market fit company. There are things that you can do to engage the target accounts, but I would there focus is really that program on generating calls and conversations with the target accounts to learn about and validate the product market fit.

So you'll have some assumptions, you'll have some hypothesies. The whole purpose of that ABM program would be to say, you know what, we believe that this target segment is the best fit, have the biggest need, whatever, Well, let's go after that segment. Run some sort of a market research play or something like that to generate goals with those stargeted accounts and get the insights and present them the product and basically get feedback from the market. At the end, you can also try selling into that market, but the focus and the KPI shouldn't be definitely linked to pipeline or revenue because there is no product market fit.

And then this is a very interesting one from Adam. How does this differ with the decentralized sales organization? This is an excellent question. Now there's two onncewers in this question.

One is about different sales regions and the other one is that they actually have a separate P and L. So addressing the regional question, we actually have this with our Roger clients very frequently. We have multiple regions. We are actually now working with a client that has sales teams in North America, Europe.

They have a separate one for Middle East Asia and they also even have like their field marketing teams also in those regions, and there is only one way that we know how to do this properly is to select a region. In this case, we have selected the North American United States as a first one, run a successful pilot, and then create what we like to call like the Center of Excellence, essentially involve the people who are participating in that pilot as kind of internal coaches to help other teams in their rollout, but also roll out region per region and treat every region with a separate pilot.

But obviously that doesn't have to mean that you're starting in doing everything from scratch. The example that I gave where we started with the US, we had somebody internally who was doing in parallel Asia. Now we are starting with Europe and we are actually using some of the content, some of the learnings from the US, but still we have to adopt it adapted to the regional realities. There will always be differences in the market, in the competition in brand awareness.

For example, in the US, our client, although they are very big in Europe, they were considered to be kind of like a European startup, or in terms of how much the buyers, senior buyers were aware of them. That was the perception. So that was a big challenge that we need to overcome in that region that maybe in another region such as Europe in this case, we didn't have to overcome. So one region is kind of the first pilot.

Lessons learned, and the people if you can train them, some people at least like one person who can kind of become this internal coach and share with their from their experience what worked and what NOTT worked, helping the other teams to introduce it, and then rolling out to other regions. Some things you can repurpose, but don't assume always start with the same approach, understanding their challenges what we have shared today. This is important to go through this process because again, challenges will be different, people will be different, collaboration between marketing and sales will be different in different regions, So don't make those assumptions that it will be the same.

You won't. So that's why you will want to go through the same process so that you actually adapt the program to the regional realities, team market customers, brand awareness, etc. Etc. So with that, I hope I have addressed all the questions.

I don't see any new questions coming in so thank you everybody for fantastic questions, great engagement, staying with us this long and next week I'm really looking forward to the session myself, so see you there and thank you very much, and goodbye.